Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ripzerai" data-source="post: 2700247" data-attributes="member: 38324">She wasn't presented as one in the 1st edition Monster Manual, or the Greyhawk supplement before that. Both she and Bahamut were presented as non-divine creatures in the 2e Draconomicon, too. In 1st edition Deities & Demigods and the 1e Manual of the Planes she was given the powers of a lesser deity, as were all planar lords by default (and this, I would argue, was a retcon rather than their original interpretation), but it wasn't actually clear that she was a goddess proper in the same sense as Zeus and Thor until Monster Mythology came out in 2nd edition and defined these things, unless you associated them completely with Paladine and Takhisis.In first edition the idea was, more or less, if you rule a layer of a plane you automatically get the powers of a lesser god. I'm not sure this made them actual gods necessarily - TSR went back and forth on that. The 1e Manual of the Planes always said treated as a deity rather than is a deity. 1e Deities & Demigods didn't make that distinction. In second edition a variety of approaches were tried - like I said, the Draconomicon made Bahamut and Tiamat non-divine "Racial Paragons." Monster Mythology made a number of the 1st editon Abyssal lords actual lesser deities, with worshippers and everything, while Planes of Chaos made others "quasi-deities," almost but not quite divine. The Lords of the Nine Dragon Magazine article defined the archdevils as being equivalent or greater in power than the gods, but different in nature.And WotC continues to go back and forth on this issue to this day. Tiamat is definitely a goddess, but Bahamut's divine status in the Forgotten Realms is unclear. Orcus appeared as a god in the Forgotten Realms Campaign setting and in Ghostwalk but has appeared as a sub-god in the Book of Vile Darkness and subsequently.I expect - some glorious day - things will stabilize and we'll have planar lords that can adequately defend their realms against attack.That's silly and short-sighted. He's chaotic evil and ambitious. He's one of the most prominent rulers of the Abyss. His plans are going to contradict someone else's eventually. It's stupid to design a cosmology that will fall apart when that day comes - as, logically, it has before and will again.The Monster Manual said he was a rival of Orcus, but that's not going to be his only rival. The Monster Manual II introduced Graz'zt, and said that he was Demogorgon's rival too. In the Gord books Demogorgon allies with Nerull and opposes a third of the other rulers of the Abyss. Politics are messy and shifting, in the Abyss as much as anywhere else. Sure, it does, when the trophy is as impressive as Demogorgon is. You can't just say something doesn't add up without justifying your claim."Overgods" ought to be powerless outside the crystal spheres they guard, as they were in Planescape. Gods who ascend beyond greater status end up on a new plane of reality as far distant from the Outer Planes as the Outer Planes are from the Material. It's only when you have an infinite hierarchy in the same Great Ring that you run into trouble.There shouldn't be any overarching deities of evil other than the fiendish lords - they're the ones who personify the alignments, not ordinary deities. Demogorgon, Apomps, Mydianchlarus, the General of Gehenna, and Asmodeus are the ones who punish upstart greater deities, or upstart deities who claim to be "overarching deities of evil" - because the turf is always truly theirs.Well, exactly. Set's victory is assured by the fact that devilkind isn't united. Think of it this way - both Baalzebul and Mephistopheles want the throne of Hell more than anything. Set allies with one of them and together they oust Asmodeus. In gratitude, Set is given Stygia for his own. Why hasn't this happened? Um, no. "Few" means there are few of them, not that there are none of them. There is no sense in which the word "few" means "none at all" - that's just not one of the definitions of the word. Few is relative, sure - it might mean only two, or "only" a few hundred (depending on how many gods of other ranks there are in the Abyss).  But it's not so relative that it can mean anything you want it to mean.The word "would," in this context, means that the greater gods who choose not to dwell in the Abyss would have to contend with the tanar'ri, if they indeed chose to dwell there. "They" refers to those greater gods who have decided not to dwell in the Demonium, not those who have - obviously they do continually deal with upstart demon life, as the demons themselves do.The gods who appeared in Deities & Demigods were hardly the only gods in the multiverse even at the time that book was published. Note that no Greyhawk-specific gods were mentioned in that book, few or no Forgotten Realms gods were mentioned, few Dragonlance gods were mentioned, and there were many deities who appeared in Gods, Demigods, and Heroes (D&Dg's predecessor) that weren't mentioned later, many deities from Dragon Magazine, and deities from everyone's personal campaigns. Of the group, only Laogzed has tanar'ri blood, and many of them had better stats than Orcus or Demogorgon.They don't have to (and can't possibly) defeat every Abyssal ruler - they only have to defeat the famous ones who have presumedly been around for more than a brief time, despite so many powerful, agressive entities sharing the cosmos with them.Fine, don't use your imagination. Rely entirely on rigid mechanics for every conceivable situation - I don't think they're necessary, myself. That line was a response your assertion that we needed to know precisely how many souls (or whatever) tanar'ri had to devour to gain a hit die. I think winging it works fine, personally. I'm not sure what that has to do with my desperate cohorts and I trying to force you to play the game a certain way with our powerful message board-based mind control techniques.Well, that's how it should be, certainly, but I'm not sure how, in a scenario where Demogorgon is a lesser god and his servants are mostly sub-divine (or even demigods - but I don't think a chaotic evil lesser god could risk having many demigods in his realm, for fear they'd gang up on him), he's going to be stronger than his divine adversaries. If they can only be killed on their home plane, they're risking nothing, and the prize is very great. Even if they didn't try to hold Gaping Maw afterwards, notoriety can translate into power for gods. If they're opposed to chaotic evil, any defeat of a major lord is a great victory for the entire multiverse.That's not a problem if Hextor is the more powerful deity. An intermediate god can reasonably break anti-teleportation wards prepared by a lesser deity and then completely avoid any other defenses or defenders that might be in his way.Everything in the Great Wheel is circular (that's the Unity-of-Rings premise), but the logic is sound. By upsetting the balance (by interfering with the Material Plane, mostly), they assure victory in their outer planar battles - which upsets the balance even more, which aids them in further victories.</blockquote>

Verification